Performance per Watt: Workstation I/O

We kind of expected this: Intel’s new solution beats the living daylights out of the hard drives, delivering a 15-17x performance increase in workstation I/O operations per second. The Samsung drive looks almost relegated to mediocrity, although that’s probably only the case for real workstation scenarios. However, none of these drives were actually designed for workstation use.

This is an amazing result: while the hard drives require 2.35 W and 2.71 W on average to deliver their 85 and 94 I/O operations per second (see chart above), the flash drives require much less to deliver many times better performance. Let’s look at performance per watt now.

This is the real deal: Intel’s X25-M provides the best performance per watt ratio. It’s double Samsung’s solution and more than 20 times better than the hard drives.

The I/O workstation efficiency tests were performed on our storage reference test system. Please refer to the test setup page for details.